George W. Barlow Founder's Award 2008

This award, in honor of one of the founders of the Animal Behavior Society, is for the best poster at the annual meeting.

THE FAMILY THAT GEORGE BUILT
By
David L. G. Noakes ¹, Jeffrey R. Baylis ²
and Judy A. Stamps ³

1 Department of Fisheries & Wildlife and Oregon, Hatchery Research Center, Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon 97331-3803, USA
2 Department of Zoology, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin 53706, USA
3 Department of Evolution and Ecology, College of Biological Sciences,University of California at Davis, Davis, California 95616, USA.

(This article can be found in full in the ABS newsletter, February 2008)

We are the lucky ones, for we knew George Barlow. We were his students, his friends, his colleagues, and his confidants. In a special sense we were part of his extended family. His immediate family included his wife of more than 50 years, Gerta, and his daughters Linda, Bicka and Nora. We had shared the experience of "Barlowing" (the word is both a noun and a verb). It refers to the act, and the action, of exuberant and animated discussions, typically around the dinner table, featuring current events, national politics, sports, fishes, animal behavior, ecology, evolution, and everything the dog did that day.

George was one of the first North Americans to undertake formal scientific studies of animal behavior in Europe, including a postdoctoral position with Konrad Lorenz at the Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Physiology-Seewiesen, where he learned to speak German fluently. The personal and professional associations he formed with European colleagues led to joint publications and friendships that lasted throughout his life (Barlow et al. 1968). As a result, George was able to provide a bridge between North American and European approaches to the study of animal behavior, a role that he fulfilled throughout the second half of the 20th century. After returning from Europe, George held academic positions at two universities, the University of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana, and the University of California at Berkeley. In addition, he was a visiting professor, invited scholar or research scholar at many institutions in North America and Europe, including notably the Animal Behaviour Research Group at Oxford University headed by Professor Niko Tinbergen, and the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies at Bielefeld, Germany, with Professor Klaus Immelman.

George was remarkable in many ways. He was a bridge in every sense of the word -- between generations, between continents, between languages, and between otherwise disparate colleagues and disciplines. He was a key figure in the formative stages of animal behavior, behavioral ecology and sociobiology. He was the authority in behavior everyone called upon, whether it was reviewing a pioneering textbook (Marler & Hamilton 1966), or editing such landmark books as the Bielefeld monograph on behavioral development (Immelman et al. 1987), the AAAS book on sociobiology (Barlow & Silverberg 1980), or writing key papers assessing the relationships between ethology and sociobiology (Barlow 1989, 1991). His approach to research was always comparative, and typically combined observations of animals in their natural environments with carefully controlled laboratory experiments (Barlow 1974). In fact, his approach was a model for the hypothetico-deductive scientific method. Initial observations, often of animals in their natural environment, led to carefully formulated hypotheses and specific predictions, followed by rigorous experimental tests to confirm or refute the hypotheses (Barlow & Siri 1997).

George listed 166 publications in his personal resume, but that is certainly an underestimate in both numbers and impact. He encouraged his students to publish on their own and did not add his name to publications unless he had made a substantial contribution to the studies. His first publications were on pupfishes (Cyprinodon species) -- a group he would revisit with his students later in his career (Barlow 1958). He published extensively on gobies (Family Gobiidae) during his doctoral studies, including physiology, ecology, behavior and taxonomy. One of his first major synthetic papers also came out of his doctoral research, when he considered the factors influencing the development of morphological characters and morphological variation in fishes (Barlow 1961). That paper is still relevant today, as we consider genetic and developmental influences on morphology, physiology and behavior. He took great personal satisfaction in his cichlid book (Barlow 2000), published after his retirement. It summarized a lifetime of field observations, laboratory experiments and informed synthesis.

Barlow, G. W. 1958. Daily movements of desert pupfish, Cyprinodon macularius, in shore pools of the Salton Sea, California. Ecology 39: 580-587.

Barlow, G.W. 1961. Causes and significance of morphological variation in fishes. Systematic Zoology 10: 105-117.

Barlow, G. W. 1968. Dither -- a way to reduce undesirable fright behavior in ethological studies. Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie 25:315-318.

Barlow, G.W. 1974. Hexagonal territories. Animal Behaviour 22:876-878.

Barlow, G.W. & Munsey, J.W. 1976. The red devil – Midas -- arrow cichlid species complex in Nicaragua, pp. 359-369. In: T.B. Thorson (editor), Investigations of the Ichthyofauna of Nicaraguan Lakes. School of Life Sciences, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Nebraska.

Barlow, G.W. 1984. The University of California, Berkeley, opens a new field station for research in tropical biology on Moorea. Environmental Biology of Fishes 11:315-316.

Barlow, G. W. 1987. Spawning, eggs and larvae of the longnose filefish Oxymonacanthus longirostris, a monogamous coralivore. Environmental Biology of Fishes 20:183-194.

Barlow, G.W. 1989. Has sociobiology killed ethology or revitalized it? Perspectives in Ethology 8:1-45.

Barlow, G.W. 1991. Nature-nurture and the debates surrounding ethology and sociobiology. American Zoologist 31:286-296.

Barlow, G.W. 2000. Cichlid Fishes. Nature's Grand Experiment in Evolution. Perseus Books, Cambridge, 334 pp.

Barlow, G. W., R. C. Francis & J. V. Baumgartner. 1990 Do the colours of parents, companions and self influence assortative mating in the polychromatic Midas cichlid? Animal Behaviour 40: 713-722.

Barlow, G.W. & Green, R.F. 1970. The problems of appeasement and of sexual roles in the courtship behavior of the blackchin mouthbreeder, Tilapia melanotheron (Pisces: Cichlidae). Behaviour 46:84-114.

Barlow, G.W., Liem, K.F. & Wickler, W. 1968. Badidae, a new fish family -- The behavioral, osteological and developmental evidence. Journal of Zoology, London 156:415-447.

Barlow, G.W. & J. Silverberg (editors) 1980. Sociobiology: Beyond Nature/Nurture? A.A.A.S. Selected Symposium 35, Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado.

Barlow, G.W. & Siri, P. 1997. Does sexual selection account for the conspicuous head dimorphism in the Midas cichlid? Animal Behaviour 53:573-584.